Contemporary Aesthetics: Special Volume--New Deadline For Articles October 31, 2018

Contemporary Aesthetics
Special Volume on “Aesthetics and Terrorism”
NEW deadline: October 31, 2018
Contact: emmareto@enl.uoa.gr.

Terrorism is unfortunately ubiquitous in the contemporary world. In the post-9/11 era, so-called “political violence” in the form of state or anti-state activity has placed itself at the very center of international politics and policies. But, of course, terrorist violence is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it has always preoccupied the minds of authorities, shattered the every-day routines of citizens, victimized thousands of people, but at the same time intrigued or even fascinated humanity with its unpredictability and suddenness. Through this lens, it is not paradoxical to admit that terrorism looms large in the artistic, literary, and philosophical imagination, and also in aesthetic debates. Although it may at first sound oxymoronic to articulate the concepts of terrorism and aesthetics in a single breath, not only is extreme political violence against (usually) non-combatants relevant to aesthetic matters and preoccupations, but it turns out that there may even be a structural link between the two. Aesthetics, here, does not necessarily hinge upon the question of beauty or artistic representation, but is more broadly defined as aesthetic experience understood as sense perception. In such a context, aesthetic sensibility has a lot to say about how terrorism is represented, employed, disseminated, reproduced, or even opposed.

Contemporary Aesthetics invites original, innovative, full-length articles that explore the connection between aesthetics and terrorism or terror across cultures, ages, genres, or discourses. CA welcome submissions on topics related (but not limited) to the following:

Aesthetic Theories, Political Violence, and the Philosophy of Terror

The Aesthetics of Suicide Attacks/Terrorism and the Body

The Politics of Aesthetics (or Aesthetics of Politics) in Terror(ism)

Radicalization as an Aesthetic Posture

Post-9/11 Political Discourse and Aesthetics

Ethics, Aesthetics, Narrativity in the Media Communication of Terror

Terrorist Discourse and the Sensorial Aspects of Terrorist Communication

Terrorism through the Perspective of Art (in its widest sense)

Morality, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Artistic Representation of Terror

Terrorism as Theatre/Performance

Society and the Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism

Counter-Terrorism, Law and Aesthetics

Urban Defense, Architecture and (Counter)Terrorism

Terrorism, Aesthetics and Ecological Consciousness

Postcolonial Aesthetics, Imagination and Terror

Religious (or not) Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Pain/Suffering

Aesthetics, Terror, Culture, and the 21st Century

Length: maximum 7,000 words, including abstract and notes. Only electronic submissions are acceptable. Deadline for submitting the full article and a short CV is October 31, 2018.

The article should be attached (as a word document) to your e-mail and sent to the guest editor,

Dr. Emmanouil Aretoulakis, emmareto@enl.uoa.gr.

For submission guidelines, see:
contempaesthetics.org
Guidelines for Article Submission
Please review the following topics in preparing your article for submission. If you have any questions or if you need assistance, please feel free to contact CA.

Forthcoming From Palgrave/Macmillan: Juries, Science, and Popular Culture In the Age of Terror: The Case of the Sydney Bomber

Forthcoming in December: Juries, Science and Popular Culture in the Age of Terror: The Case of the Sydney Bomber (David Tait and Jane Goodman-Delahunty, eds., Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016). David Tait is a professor at Western Sydney University, Australia. Jane Goodman-Delahunty is a professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Terrorism has become an everyday reality in most contemporary societies. In a context of heightened fear can juries be trusted to remain impartial when confronted by defendants charged with terrorism? Do they scrutinize prosecution cases carefully, or does emotion trump reason once the spectre of terrorism is invoked? This book examines these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The authors look at the how jurors in terrorism trials are likely to respond to gruesome evidence, including beheading videos. The 'CSI effect' is examined as a possible response to forensic evidence, and jurors with different learning preferences are compared. Virtual interactive environments, built like computer games, may be created to provide animated reconstructions of the prosecution or defence case. This book reports on how to create such presentations, culminating in the analysis of a live simulated trial using interactive visual displays followed by jury deliberations. The team of international, transdisciplinary experts draw conclusions of global legal and political significance, and contribute to the growing scholarship on comparative counter-terrorism law. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners of law, criminal justice, forensic science and psychology.

Joyce and Simm on Zero Dark Thirty, International Law, and Film

Daniel Joyce, Lecturer, UNSW Australia, Faculty of Law, and Affiliated Research Fellow, Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, and Gabrielle Simm, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, and Visiting Fellow, Australian Human Rights Centre, UNSW Australia Faculty of Law, have published Zero Dark Thirty: International Law, Film, and Representation at 3 London Review of International Law 295 (2015). Here is the abstract.

This article explores the relationship between film and international law by reference to the feature film Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The authors examine this film in the context of international law, while also considering related questions of genre, torture, gender and targeted killing.

The full text is available by subscription.

The Definitions of Terrorism

Ben Saul, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, is publishing Defining Terrorism: A Conceptual Minefield in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (A. Gofas, R. English, S. N. Kalyvas, and E. Chnoweth, eds., Oxford University Press, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Calls to define ‘terrorism’ as a legal concept arose in the context of efforts to extradite ‘political offenders’ from the 1930s onwards, with many efforts, over 80 years to the present, to define, criminalize, and depoliticise a common global concept of ‘terrorism’. Those international efforts remain largely unsuccessful to this day. After the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’), many states enacted ‘terrorism’ offences, spurred on by the perceived threat of global religious terrorism, obligations imposed by the UN Security Council, gaps in existing criminal liabilities and police powers, and the expressive function of stigmatising terrorism as a special kind of violence against public interests. National laws remain, however, startlingly diverse and there is still a global divergence. At the international level, there is certainly a basic legal consensus that terrorism is criminal violence intended to intimidate a population or coerce a government or international organisation; some national laws add an ulterior intention to pursue a political, religious or ideological cause. There remain intense moral and political disagreements, however, on whether there should be exceptions for just causes (such as liberation violence and rebellion), armed conflicts, and state violence. As a result, a conceptual impasse continues, even if agreement has been edging closer.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Controversy Over Metropolitan Opera Presentation of "The Death of Klinghoffer"

The Metropolitan Opera has moved ahead with a presentation of John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer despite many protests that the work glorifies anti-Semitism. Here's an account from the New York Times. The New Yorker first covered such objections back in June. Here's a link to the Met website for the piece. Here's a review from the New Yorker.

Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian terrorists during a hijacking in 1985 aboard the cruise ship the Achille Lauro. The terrorists forced two crew members to throw his body overboard in the waters off Syria. The Syrians eventually recovered his body and returned it to the United States.

A DVD of The Death of Klinghoffer is available from Decca. Singers include Sanford Sylvan, Christopher Maltman, and Yvonne Howard. The composer conducts the London Symphony Orchestra.

The story has also been filmed as Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair, starring Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint (1990).

On the events during and after the hijacking see

Michael K. Bohn, The Achille Lauro Hijacking: Lessons in the Politics and Prejudice of Terrorism (Potomac Books, 2004).

Antonio Cassese, Terrorism, Politics, and Law: The Achille Lauro Affairs (Princeton University Press, 1989).

The Posse Comitatus Act and Today's Navy

Mark Nevitt, U. S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps, is publishing Unintended Consequences: The Posse Comitatus Act in the Modern Era in the Cardozo Law Review. Here is the abstract.

America was born in revolution. Outraged at numerous abuses by the British crown — to include the conduct of British soldiers in the colonists’ daily lives — Americans declared their independence, creating a new republic with deep suspicions of a standing Army. These suspicions were intensely debated at the time of the nation’s formation and enshrined in the Constitution. But congressional limitations on the role of the military in day-to-day affairs would have to wait. They were not put in place until after the Civil War when southern congressmen successfully co-opted the framers’ earlier concerns of a standing Army and passed a criminal statute — the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (“PCA”) — that restricted the ability of the Army to be used as a “posse comitatus” to “execute the laws.” Today, the PCA’s history and scope are often misunderstood with continual unintended consequences for today’s modern military that is far removed from the law’s earlier constitutional and statutory origins.

This article addresses a significant unintended consequence in the modern era: the PCA’s peculiar modern application to the Navy. The text of the PCA is silent on the Navy, yet the Department of Defense has determined that the PCA applies to the Navy worldwide. The early civil libertarian concerns that originated with the birth of the republic and at the time of the PCA’s passage are based on concerns over a standing Army. These are fundamentally distinguishable from the Navy, the maritime-based armed force that largely operates on the high seas, far away from America’s geographic borders and removed from its citizenry. The Navy’s mission includes the maintenance of freedom of the seas to include the suppression of piracy. But the DoD’s application of the PCA to the Navy limits its ability to participate in the full array of maritime missions — of continual concern with the rise of maritime terrorism that continually blurs the line between law enforcement and military activities. Building on the Navy example, this article concludes by offering recommendations to remedy this historical incongruity while touching upon other areas — such as the rise of the National Security Agency and the complex modern military organization — where the PCA and associated civil-military relationship need further re-examination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Two Articles On Law and Literature

José Calvo González, School of Law, University of Malaga, has published El Delincuente Honrado (1773) de Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, in REJIE: Revista Jurídicade Investigación e Innovación Educativa (No. 7, January 2013), pp. 9-30.

Also of interest: Luis Rosenfield, Ponitifica Universidade do Rio Grando do Sul, Brasil, has published

Terrorismo, Tortura e Direitos Humanos: Reflexoes a partir de O Prisioneiro,Erico Veríssimo, in REJIE: Revista Jurídica de Investigación e Innovación Educativa, (No. 7 January 2013), pp. 31-50.

International Law, Torture and "24"

Knut Fournier has published Torture Justification in ‘24’: Aesthetics of the Bush Administration

In the context of the War on Terror, fiction is a support of ideologies for the Bush administration. The TV series '24' resorts on all legal justifications of torture made by the Bush administration, and justifies torture as being necessary, effective, and lawful. In that justification process, the thesis of the main international lawyers supportive of the Bush doctrines are used in a very detailed way, maintaining a 'simulacra' in the sense of Baudrillard.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. NB: The text is in French.

Free Speech and the Fight Against Terrorism

Owen Fiss, Yale University Law School, has published The World We Live In, at 83 Temple Law Review 295-308 (Winter 2011).

This Essay focuses on a threat to our constitutional order — the curtailment of freedom of speech in the name of fighting terrorism. Specifically, my subject is the Supreme Court’s decision last June in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which upheld the authority of Congress to criminalize political advocacy on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations. Like warrantless wiretapping, the risk of a criminal prosecution for political advocacy — for example, an utterance by an American citizen in an American forum that a foreign terrorist organization has a just cause — poses a threat to our democracy, but the danger is greater. The risk of warrantless wiretapping inhibits speech; the risk of a criminal prosecution stops it altogether.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Terrorism and Armed Conflict

Andrea Bianchi, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, has published Terrorism and Armed Conflict: Insights from a Law & Literature Perspective at 24 Leiden Journal of International Law 1 (2011). Here is the abstract.

This article examines some selected issues relating to terrorism and international humanitarian law (IHL): the characterization of the nature of armed conflicts in which armed groups, qualified as ‘terrorist,’ are involved; terrorism as a war crime; and the determination of the status and treatment (including detention) of terrorist suspects apprehended in the course of an armed conflict. The analysis emphasizes the importance of legal categories and legal qualifications of factual situations for the purpose of determining the applicable law as well as the crucial importance of taking societal practice into account when evaluating the state of the law in any given area. The main focus of the article, however, is on providing a few basic insights, drawn from the law & literature movement, on international humanitarian law and terrorism. Short of any epistemological ambition, literature is used as a remainder that the law is not a set of neutral rules, elaborated and applied independently of context and historical background; that the human condition remains central; and that legal regulation cannot be oblivious to it. Finally, mention is made of interpretive techniques, developed in the field of literary studies, that may help establish social consensus on the interpretation of IHL grey areas.

The full text is not available from SSRN.